This paper uses specific issues surrounding course
blogging to provide a series of reflections
regarding the articulation between pedagogy and
technology in creating a next generation learning
space and discourse community. It investigates the
underlying structure and necessary constituent
elements of a successful blog assignment and
examines the notion of natural and unnatural virtual
environments and the roles of the reader and the
writer-reader. It suggests that blog assignments may
not succeed equally well in all subject areas and
gives a number of possible reasons. Furthermore, it
posits a more nuanced criterion for the definition
of goals and the evaluation of the success of a blog
assignment as a learning community beyond the
presence or absence of comments.

In the face of the glowing rhetoric of potential for
the educational applications of Web 2.0, it is easy
to see how many instructors across a broad range of
disciplines are motivated to try to integrate this
technology into their teaching. Brown and Adler
(2008) tell us that “the
most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that
has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to
support and expand the various aspects of social
learning.” At the same time, the social
element of a class blog is also the point at which
many a blog assignment falls short of the mark, to
the frustration and puzzlement of instructors. It is
too facile, however, to ascribe failed blog
assignments to student apathy, or conversely, to
student over-commitment. Certainly these constants
in education have their role. The break-point in
course work, however, does not seem to be an issue
of whether or not the students wrote blogs. Rather,
the break point, the point at which the instructor
feels the assignment to have failed in some way, is
when these individual written elements fail to
interconnect – when the social element, upon which
instructors place high hopes for a subsequent
critical element – fails to materialize. This paper
uses the specific issues surrounding a class blog to
provide a series of reflections about the
articulation between pedagogy and technology in
creating a true virtual learning community. It
examines the notion of natural and unnatural virtual
environments and the roles of the reader and the
writer-reader in the underlying structure and
necessary constituent elements of a successful blog
assignment.

Pedagogy 2.0

According to Lenhart, Madden, Macgill and Smith
(2007) of the Pew Internet and American Life
Project, 93% of American teens use the Internet, and
of those teens online, 28% have created their own
journal or blog. Fifty-five percent of online teens
have a profile on a social networking site such as
Facebook or
MySpace. We can therefore assume that our
students are capable, perhaps even comfortable with
this technology. Why then, in reading any discussion
of the pedagogical uses of blogs, are they still
couched so much in terms of potential, rather than
fact? Note the extensive use, even here, of words
like “can,” “may,” and “potentially.” Beneath the
visionary rhetoric lies one of the hidden weaknesses
of the educational application of social technology
– the fact that the potential for peer learning
through technology is
inherent neither in the technology itself nor in
one’s familiarity with it.

One way to understand the transition between
traditional assignment structures and the potential
for assignments using Learning Management System (LMS)
technology would be to apply Tim O’Reilly’s (2006)
three levels of “Web 2.0-ness” to technology and
pedagogy. O’Reilly defines a range of Web
applications as level 0 to level 3 according to the
degree to which they use the Internet interactively.
At the bottom of the scale are applications that,
while available over the net, do not depend on the
net for their function, and would perhaps function
just as well offline as online. At the top of the
scale (level 3) are applications that exist only
through the network and the connections it makes
possible between people or applications. These are
applications that harness collective intelligence to
get better the more people use them. The difference
could be described as the difference between an
online dictionary (convenient, but not substantially
superior to its offline or even to its paper
equivalent) and
Wikipedia, which is constantly growing and
evolving through user contribution and review. Many
will argue that Wikipedia is not in fact superior to
a paper encyclopedia, but no one is going to argue
that it is the same.

There is a side note to be made here, however. While
Wikipedia or an online dictionary might be
considered to have universal appeal, the term
blogosphere, commonly used to refer to the ensemble
of blogs on the net as an interconnected community,
is something of a misnomer in the singular. Think
rather of blogospheres, of overlapping
circles of information, each representing a
different community. Followers of stock car racing
and collectors of needlepoint samplers may have few
points of spontaneous contact; their online
communities do not overlap substantially. The plural
blogospheres is thus a useful way of
expressing the fact that social networking operates
on strength of relationship, which is to say that
the odds are not in fact even that a professor of
French literature will spontaneously read a blog
about manga collecting, versus a blog about academic
life, or language teaching. Nor are the vast
majority of Internet travelers seeking student
essays in beginning French describing a pet. And
though they may encounter such a blog through a
search engine, it is even more unlikely that they
will linger to comment. Consequently, the degree of
affiliation a given user feels with a particular Web
2.0 environment can also impact the degree to which
they actively contribute to O’Reilly’s different
levels.

For the purposes of this paper, therefore,
O’Reilly’s categories are principally useful as a
notion of continuum, a notion that can be transposed
in interesting ways from the technology of teaching
to a reflection on pedagogy. In his article,
O’Reilly is attempting to define Web 2.0
technologies on their own terms, as they exist in
the real virtual world. Within the context of a
syllabus or a classroom, however, these same
technologies take on different characteristics
according to the structure of the assignment,
sometimes becoming something quite distinct from
their original virtual world application. In other
words, one might be tempted to assume that if a
technology is interactive in its natural user
environment, it will necessarily be interactive in
its academic user environment. The question of the
pedagogical efficacy of a given technology is thus
shifted away from the instructor and towards the
technical support staff; away from the assignment
and towards the tool.

The idea then would be that if you know how to post
to a blog, you automatically know how to assign a
blog, and that when you do, the results will in most
ways mimic the real-world application of the tool.
There are several problems with this assumption.
First, while traditional assignment structures do
transfer to blog structures fairly cleanly, they do
not automatically transform themselves into
interactive assignments as a result. In other words,
while the blog world might be interactive, the
assigned blog can very easily be no more than a
complicated way to submit an individual essay. To
give another example, while a community-authored
blog, in which a group of people collectively author
and comment and re-author a blog together, might
represent a level-2 or a level-3 level application
on O’Reilly’s continuum, a blog used to communicate
documents primarily from the individual to the
professor or from the professor to the individual,
with little or no lateral movement, and little or no
reciprocation, might actually be classified as a
Web-0 application. Which is to say, it might be
convenient, but paper is cheaper.

Or, to take it back to a different O’Reilly article
(2005), Web 1.0 is the personal Web page, whereas
Web 2.0 is blogging, the difference between the two
residing in the level of writer-reader-writer
interaction. And not all class blogs are blogging.
Why? Well, students are remarkably adept at
distinguishing between “work” and “fun”. Personal
blogging might be fun. Blogging for a course is
homework. Or, to cite Bugeja
(2008), in our
attempts to engage today’s students,
“we have embraced
consumer technologies on the flawed assumption that
students want to learn through the same devices that
amuse and distract them.” It is therefore not
sufficient to say that blogs “allow” for students to
provide feedback and encouragement for each other;
that students “may” engage in critical discussion
outside of the classroom; that students should be
“encouraged” to read and comment on each others’
blogs. In order to design successful blog
assignments, we have to remember that a class
blogosphere is a fundamentally artificial social
environment. This means that a class blogosphere
actually has to impose the interactive structure
spontaneously present in the public blogosphere
through a combination of assignment design
and student accountability. It is not enough that
blog technology allows other students to read and
respond to content; they must be held accountable
for this reading, or it will not take place. The
very key to the success of a blog assignment
structure, then, is fundamentally counterintuitive.
In order to take advantage of the virtual social
space that is spontaneously created in the natural
blogosphere,
course work must dictate the precise level of
engagement of the participants, must make the class
blogosphere entirely unnatural because not
spontaneously social.

Another factor to take into account when reflecting
on the natural tendencies vs. assigned use of social
software is a little tip-of-the-iceberg idea from
Ben McConnell (2006) called the “1% rule.” Looking
at statistics from Wikipedia
and Yahoo,
McConnell estimates that for every one hundred
visitors to a collaborative online environment, only
one will add content. That’s ninety-nine silent
lurkers for every visible contribution, which means
that even very successful and highly visible social
networks have extremely low levels of direct
participation from the larger reading (lurking)
community. It is therefore hardly surprising that it
takes effort and ingenuity to implement a
collaborative environment as part of a course, if
the interactive element that seems such a natural
outgrowth of social networking software in everyday
use is in fact only a small portion of online
activity.

A class blog with blog posts but no comments,
potentially considered a failure by an instructor
with high hopes for mutual criticism and
encouragement, takes on a different light with
McConnell’s 1% rule in mind. Certainly the active
discussion element, in the form of comments, remains
a desirable goal. The failure of a blog exercise to
generate these comments spontaneously, however, is
not necessarily a sign that the exercise as a whole
is failing. The students very likely are
reading, but even with the hypothesis that
interaction levels are naturally higher between
students than they are in the general population,
the odds are still very much against the spontaneous
development of a virtual community around a course
blog. Consequently, if an active discussion around
blog posts is one of the principal goals of the blog
assignment, the precise degree and nature of that
discussion must be imposed through realistic comment
quotas combined with specific grading rubrics. Then,
ideally, the discussion will take on a life of its
own and expand beyond the imposed discourse. But
don’t wait to start class until it happens.

The importance of this level of detail in the
imposed structure of the class blogosphere is
somewhat obfuscated in literature on the topic by
three factors. Firstly, very few published articles
are generated by failed assignments. Success stories
are much more marketable; certainly more flattering.
So, it is important to bear in mind the unknown and
unnamed numbers of failed applications of blog
technology to teaching, and be reminded that without
more information about those failures, the portrait
of other successes is necessarily incomplete.
Secondly, those success stories that are published
also represent a skewed sample, insofar as many of
them narrate the use of blogs in classes about
information literacy and technology. When a blog
is introduced into a course called “Learning,
Reading and Culture” as part of a unit on new
literacies (Betts & Glogoff, 2004), or into a course
called “Instructional
Technology Foundations and Learning Theory” (Dabbagh
& Gilbert, 2005), it is both a tool for study
and the object of study in and of itself. The second
point, therefore, is that the numerous course case
studies of blogging assignments attached to courses
involving the application of information technology
are misleading in their success. While they offer
important reflections, they also benefit from a
certain “naturalness” of context for the blog
assignment that a course on 17th-century
literature, for example, simply does not have.

Finally, class blogospheres attached to courses
about blogging (or indeed, any other active,
contemporary topic) are much more likely to
intersect spontaneously with real-world readers and
bloggers from outside the instructional context. A
professor contemplating incorporating a blog element
into a less directly related area of study needs to
be aware of this factor and realize that all of the
promise of blogs is not equally accessible to all
subject areas, even though this discrepancy between
disciplines is almost never incorporated in
discussions about the positive potential for
blogging in education. To give another example,
Brown and Adler (2008) cite the experiences of David
Wiley, a professor at Utah State University, to
demonstrate how the power of participation can be
harnessed within a single course. Wiley mentions
that one of the student assignments in his course
was commented on and linked to from a very prominent
blogger, and that many people read the student blogs
and subscribed to some of them. According to him,
there was a direct corollary between the proof of
outside readership through comment and subscription
and improvements in the quality of student writing,
an improvement he attributes to the power of peer
review. The title of Wiley’s course? “Understanding
Online Interaction.”

Okay, but how do I do that?

At this point, it seems appropriate to move the
discussion to a more specific analysis of different
factors affecting the success of class blog
assignments, organized around a series of questions.

Expert… or not ?

As an online publishing exercise, the class blog is
fraught with potential for insecurity for the
posting student. First and foremost, in contrast to
real-world blogs, where individuals principally
write from their strengths about things that they
know well, course blogs frequently ask students to
publicly display their attempts to write about
things that they do not necessarily know well and
that they may in fact misrepresent entirely. This
difference potentially transforms the blog
assignment from a seemingly friendly technology into
a very threatening assignment. The nature of the
blog writing assignment is thus an important factor
to take into consideration. Will the students be
writing personal narrative, presenting factual
information about a real-world topic, or writing
critical responses to a text not included in the
blog diegesis? These considerations are important
because the degree of personal authority that the
student brings to the assignment, the external
accessibility of the argument or information
included, and the degree of personal exposure that
the student feels in executing the task are all
interrelated. Correspondingly, if the class bloggers
are unsure about exposing their work to the group,
they will likewise be even more reluctant to comment
(read, criticize) the work of their classmates.

Who is reading? The anxiety of the anonymous reader

To return to the original analogy between “Web 2.0”
and “pedagogy 2.0,” both concepts hinge upon the
active presence of a reader. Note the use of the
word “active” here. Web pages (already identified as
Web 1.0 documents) have many readers. Their presence
on the page, however, is no more intrusive or
explicit than the numbers on the hit counter at the
bottom of the page. The key difference between a
true blog and a Web page, then, is not reading
itself, but what we will call
“visible reading,” the
act of reading made visible through the traces left
behind in the form of comments. Visible reading,
however, is much more stressful than mere browsing,
reading without leaving a trace, insofar as it
exposes the writer to criticism at the same time as
it records the reader’s passage.
Consequently, in order to create a successful class
blogosphere, “the first task of the e-learning
teacher is to develop a sense of trust and safety
within the electronic community. In the absence of
this trust, learners will feel uncomfortable and
constrained in posting their thoughts and comments.”
(Anderson 2004, Bender 2006) Windham confirms this
anxiety – “posting information online makes users
think twice about its content and perception.”
(Windham 2007)

Note the emphasis on perception here. Perception is
not just a reception question but also a production
question, and the imaginary reader is the source of
both anxiety and pleasure in this dynamic. The
hesitation that many students bring to a class blog
in the early stages is in part the expression of
their anxiety about reader-perception, about how
their work will be perceived by their peers. The
emphasis is on the peer reader here because in the
context of the traditional assignment structure,
student work targets only one reader – the
instructor. Face-to-face peer review in the context
of the classroom directly expands that readership;
peer readership outside of the classroom opens it up
entirely, insofar as the asynchronous nature of the
blog environment means that at any point, any one of
the student’s classmates could be reading, could be
reacting or even judging their work. Windham goes on
to suggest that these early anxieties are usually
temporary, and in a successful class blogosphere
they are – almost by definition.

One small but important factor mitigating the
feeling of exposure that many students experience
with online discussion is the
(potentially)
personalized nature of the blog environment. Ducate
(2005) describes the blog space as
a personal home, created by one owner as a place to
express his or her personal voice and opinion.
A blog is private space despite its public
visibility, because its basic tone, shape and
content are controlled by the blogger. Comments, by
their organization, marginal position on the page,
and minimal esthetic control, do not impinge upon
the private-space nature of a blog. The primary
identity of the blog-space will always be that of
the bloggers themselves. For this reason, the degree
to which blog support allows for individualized blog
spaces appears to have a very real impact on its
success as a social-environment tool. With no visual
customization options, the advantages of a blog
space over a forum space are minimized, and perhaps
disappear entirely.

This is significant in the context of blogs
contained within LMS environments because, compared
to blog environments such as
Wordpress or
Blogger, for example, they currently offer very
little in the way of personalization of the virtual
learning space. Becker and Henriksen (2006)
attribute this lack to LMS designs based on 19th
and 20th-century pedagogical models that
fail to recognize the potential in social
constructivist models for learning. According to
their vision, the next generation of LMS need to
provide the personalization options necessary for
each student-user to be able to shape their own PLE,
or Personal Learning Environment, within the context
of the LMS, instead of imposing one static learning
environment for all users. The nature of this larger
shift towards a decentralized, learner-centric model
for the LMS is already apparent in the role of the
instructor in the class blog environment.

What is the role of the instructor-reader?

If we move from the question of the invisible reader
to the visible reader in our discussion of student
blogger anxiety, we see that the issue of
reader-perception as a source of anxiety or
reassurance also shifts according to the identity of
the commenter. Instructor comments and student
comments do not play the same role in the class
blogosphere. This is an important point in defining
and maintaining the nature and degree of instructor
presence necessary to successful course blogging, in
particular because the instructor’s role in the
class blogosphere is potentially quite different
from their role in the classroom.
In the traditional
classroom, instructor feedback on individual written
assignments is entirely private, a privileged
communication between the instructor and the
student. In the more public context of a
class blogosphere,
however, instructor comments not only provide
feedback, but also model feedback in a way that
directly informs the normative effect of the public
writing project. The instructor’s input into the
class blog thus serves as a constant example of how
to engage not only
with the primary source material
but also with one’s
fellow students.
In order for this example to be most effective, the
instructor must take on the role of a student
in this community – a very articulate, well-informed
student, perhaps, but nonetheless that of a student,
writing about the
material within the context
and limitations of
the assignment while demonstrating the sort of that
the student will hopefully achieve over the course
of the class.

From this we discern yet another contradiction in
the underlying structure of a class blogosphere. To
the degree to which writing is a self-conscious
social act performed with a specific audience in
mind, the instructor, as the shaping authority of
the “discourse community” is all-powerful and
students are constantly aware of that power (Johns,
1990, 31). This means that despite the importance
and desirability of transforming a class into a
blogging community, the first and most important
reader in every student’s mind remains the
instructor. For while student-student interaction is
critical for learning designs based upon
constructivist learning theories, student-teacher
interaction currently has the highest perceived
value among students and thus commands highest
market value. (Anderson, 2002) This is in part the
obvious and natural consequence of the fact that
blogs which count towards the student’s grade are,
in fact, graded. Most of the time (excluding peer
review structures that actually incorporate peer
grading into the assignment) that grade will be
determined principally, even exclusively, by the
professor. The level of
accountability necessary to ensure universal
participation in a course blog thus virtually
guarantees a hierarchy of readership in course
blogging, with the instructor at the top of the
pyramid. Student awareness of this hierarchy impacts
the structure and interaction of the community,
regardless of whether or not the instructor
participates openly through posts and comments.

Understanding blogs as a “discourse communities”

One way to look at the impact of these dynamics on a
class project is to borrow the notion of discourse
community from the literature of English for
Academic Purposes (Swales,1990). A discourse
community shares common goals, a means of internal
communication and feedback, an agreed-upon (although
not always overtly defined) format or genre for its
communications, and a certain shared level of
content or discourse expertise among its members. A
class blogosphere clearly meets all of the basic
criteria for a discourse community and thus
potentially experiences many of the same patterns as
those studied in the context of composition courses.
The point of bringing this literature into this
discussion is that almost all blog assignments are
writing assignments – and people who teach
writing as a profession have a lot to offer people
who assign writing in other contexts in terms of the
different ways in which writing communities come
into being, interact, and dissipate. In other words,
part of the myopia of the teaching and technology
discourse is the way in which new technologies have
propagated this kind of assignment far beyond the
English composition class, without necessarily also
propagating the pedagogical knowledge that would
normally accompany it.

If a blog is written and no one comments, did it
make a sound?

This paper began with the statement that instructors
might be tempted to label a blog project as a
success or failure based on the number of comments
elicited, rather than the number or quality of
posts, or on the reader experience. The obvious
question in this case is what degree of
effectiveness can be found in the blog assignment
alone, independent of any commenting activity.
Certainly it seems that the blog writing assignment
should not be somehow less effective than the
traditional written page handed directly to the
instructor, particularly if the instructor provides
feedback and evaluation. It seems clear, however,
that the blog assignment can offer added value over
the private writing assignment, even without an
active comment field. This added value comes as a
result of student reading of peer blogs from the
class, and leads to several questions :

1.
In the absence of comments, what are the signs and
effects of student reading?

2.
Are there other ways besides comment quotas to
enforce student reading?

3.
Is the silent reader a passive reader?

1.In
the absence of comments, what are the signs and
effects of student reading?

Making coursework public, as is the case with a
class blog, can have a marked (and usually positive)
normalizing effect within a very short amount of
time. This normative effect takes place within the
first or second cycle of shared assignments, almost
without instructor intervention. Students
investigate the work of their peers to measure their
effort and ensure that they have not failed in any
conspicuous way to match at least the average
performance. This private comparison, in combination
with the private feedback they receive from the
instructor (their grade for the assignment) rapidly
communicates a clear sense of the standards of the
community, and of their relative standing in
relationship to those standards. Without knowing the
precise grade received by anyone but themselves,
students very quickly identify the most successful
work, and work that seems inferior or insufficient
in relationship to the class norm, and adapt their
efforts accordingly. The advantage of this approach
is that the students themselves do the majority of
the critical evaluation necessary to bring their
work in line with the standards of the community,
instead of merely receiving a recipe for improvement
from the instructor. Note
that in this context a credited but ungraded
trial run of a community assignment structure,
ostensibly to ensure that everyone is able to use
the technology required, can be an efficient and
non-confrontational way of defining the goals of the
assignment through this sort of private comparison
of the qualities and defects of peer texts with the
student’s own production.

2. Are there other ways besides comment quotas to
enforce student reading?

When a topic or assignment is directly connected to
a larger assessment exercise, such as an exam or a
paper, students also read each others’ posts as a
way of studying the material through exposure to
different approaches and observations. Obviously,
there is a risk that some of the material posted
will perpetuate incorrect information, but it must
also be noted that for a post to actually propagate
a mistake, its errors must be indistinguishable to
the average reader. This is often not the case – in
fact, the process of identifying which material is
useful and on target and which material lacks the
necessary substance significantly contributes to the
larger goal of developing critical thinking skills.
Furthermore, as long as the instructor comments,
even if no one else from the course does, the
instructor can ask questions that will point both
the original author and any other readers in the
right direction, without necessarily rejecting the
post out of hand.

3. Is the silent reader a passive reader?

Our exploration of the first two questions in this
section would suggest that the answer to this third
and final question is “No.” Reading other posts to
compare them with one’s own production involves
critical reading and comparison of a series of texts
both to each other (to establish the norm) and to
one’s own work (to ascertain one’s standing relative
to the whole). Reading, even browsing the global
output of the class blogosphere to prepare for an
exam, involves evaluating the quality, and therefore
usefulness, of each proposed text. While it cannot
be ensured that every student is experiencing every
step of this critical progression, these are not
passive reading tasks – in fact, quite the opposite.

To blog or not to blog?

Blogging does have tremendous potential for
the classroom, and this potential is in large part
linked to the social network structure. This
potential is not an automatic consequence of using
or assigning the technology, however, despite the
fact that many of today’s students are practitioners
outside of the context of the classroom.
Furthermore, the emphasis on the educational
potential of social software, on Web 2.0, on
learning communities and virtual and personal
learning environments, has defined the “social” in
social network too narrowly, concentrating attention
on the visible manifestation of interaction
(comments) to the neglect and dismissal of the
invisible interactions that take place even in the
absence of documented response. The picture is
therefore incomplete. In order to understand fully
and implement successfully blogging assignments, the
anxious writer must be reassured, the neglected
reader must be revived and rewarded, and the
comments, if desired, must be assigned.

Blogging in the next generation LMS

In order to empower the writer and validate the
reader, and perhaps in the process facilitate the
creation of a truly active and interactive online
community around a course, LMS blog tools need to
learn from their real-world counterparts, while
taking steps to address the ways in which the course
blog environment is not at all analogous to the
larger blogosphere(s). The adaptations that must be
made to accomplish these goals in the context of
blogging fall into two categories; personalization
and assessment. Personalization of the blog
environment is necessary to create the private space
effect described by Ducate (2005); it is a necessary
component in the construction of a virtual identity
for each student, which is itself the foundation of
any desired social or community effect. (Becker &
Henriksen, 2006) In this respect, therefore,
designers of LMS blogs need to be very careful
before they dismiss the aesthetic options available
through the public blogosphere as unnecessary
components.

The second key element to creating a successful LMS
blog tool is motivated by the problems discussed
here in assessing a successful blog exercise.
Instructors need better monitoring tools, tools that
will allow them to
quietly track student activity through the
class blogosphere, tools whose development has been
actively suppressed in the public blogosphere
because of privacy concerns. RSS feeds, widely
advertised as the miracle answer, are in practice a
woefully inefficient way of sorting and tracking a
class blog with required comments. Each student
represents two separate feeds to follow, and even
then only if the class uses the Wordpress platform
(tracking student comments on the other platforms is
even more difficult.) Furthermore, comment tracking
is an obviously inadequate method of tracking
reading, as opposed to reading-and-writing, of
blogs. The need for improved tracking tools in next
generation LMS, tools that will allow instructors to
better evaluate the sometimes-silent successes of
blog exercises, is thus clear and pressing.
Instructors able to follow the life of the virtual
environment more closely from behind the scenes will
better perform their role as open facilitator in the
virtual learning environment, and in the process
greatly increase their odds of success in leveraging
the power of social networking software for
educational purpose.